Pressure builds for Liberals in tight Toronto byelections that could have implications in 2015 vote

Rocco Catalano runs out his front door and into the street to talk to Adam Vaughan. On the television inside, his precious Italian soccer team is playing for its life against Uruguay. He hasn’t even put on his shoes — that’s how badly he wants to talk to the local politician. As the two chat, it’s clear they go way back. But Mr. Catalano isn’t happy about Liberal leader Justin Trudeau and he is letting Mr. Vaughan know it. Until recently, Mr. Vaughan was his city councillor. Now Mr. Vaughan is the Liberal candidate in Trinity-Spadina, one of four federal ridings holding byelections Monday. The Conservatives are expected to hold the two seats in Alberta. But for the two Toronto ridings, Trinity-Spadina and Scarborough-Agincourt, nothing is certain. Lee Berthiaume of Postmedia News takes a closer look at the two Toronto ridings.

Trinity-Spadina

The downtown riding that houses the CN Tower, Kensington Market and the Air Canada Centre is considered a bellwether; when the Liberals win it, they tend to form government in Ottawa. When the NDP wins, the Liberals are relegated to the opposition benches (and are currently the third party).

From 2006 to this year, the riding was held by the NDP’s Olivia Chow, who resigned to take on Rob Ford, John Tory and others in the race for Toronto’s mayoralty.

“As political turf, it is profoundly symbolic,” Mr. Vaughan says of the riding. “If the Liberals re-establish themselves in the centre of Toronto, they have a base.”

But things got ugly in a hurry. Lawyer Christine Innes, the wife of a former Liberal minister, had hoped to carry the party banner again after doing so in 2008 and 2011. Instead, Mr. Trudeau barred her from running, setting off a war of words and lawsuits.

The affair prompted complaints from some Liberals that Mr. Trudeau had broken a promise to allow open nominations. Mr. Catalano is among them, which is why he has run outside in his socks to talk to the Liberal candidate.

Not only has Mr. Catalano always supported Mr. Vaughan on city council, he says he has been “Liberal all my life.” Yet his front lawn is strewn with signs for Joe Cressy, the federal NDP candidate.

“You can blame Trudeau for what I’ve done,” Mr. Catalano tells Mr. Vaughan. “When I read he played a game [with Ms. Innes’s nomination], he butchered you on my account.”

Mr. Vaughan, the former television journalist and two-term city councillor, was recruited by Mr. Trudeau’s team months after the Innes decision. But the fact he is now the candidate has associated him with the spat. It has also put extra pressure on him to win, not just for the Liberals but for Mr. Trudeau himself.

There is huge pressure on the NDP and candidate Cressy as well.

Ms. Chow’s re-election here in 2011 was no surprise, but her party’s emergence as the Official Opposition under Ms. Chow’s husband, late NDP leader Jack Layton, was. Mr. Layton’s successor, Tom Mulcair, is striving to maintain the momentum.

The 29-year-old Cressy is a director at the Stephen Lewis Foundation, which does work on AIDS in Africa. In addition, he managed Ms. Chow’s 2011 re-election campaign and that of Jack Layton’s son Mike, now a city councillor.

Mr. Cressy doesn’t have the name recognition or experience of either Ms. Chow or Mr. Vaughan. He has tried to make up for that with hustle. He has also recruited big local names such as Councillor Layton and respected Chinese-Canadian doctor Joseph Wong to his cause.

He concedes there is pressure to keep Trinity-Spadina orange. “I owe it to the party to leave everything on the line, to work as hard as I am physically able to hold this seat.”

Scarborough-Agincourt

Liberal MP Jim Karygiannis had represented the riding — encompassing a large area of suburbia that is home to thousands of Chinese families as well as Armenians, Tamils, Greeks and others — since 1988, until the surprise announcement that he was stepping down on April 1.

It was no secret that Mr. Karygiannis’s scrappy approach wasn’t welcome by Mr. Trudeau and his advisers. If they didn’t push him out, they certainly weren’t sorry to see him go.

Mr. Karygiannis told the Globe and Mail in late April: “This is not the same Liberal Party we knew. The party has changed.” Mr. Trudeau’s right-hand man, Gerald Butts, tweeted shortly after: “So Jim Karygiannis says this is not the Liberal Party he used to know. I post that without comment.”

Scarborough-Agincourt, however, wasn’t a Liberal riding; it was a Jim Karygiannis riding.

“I supported Jim because Jim did his job,” says Anthony Internicola as he talks with friends at a local restaurant. Internicola is now leaning Conservative because he knows Tory candidate Trevor Ellis.

On the other side of the room, Bernie Snodofsky, finishing his breakfast, says he always voted for Mr. Karygiannis. But when he got to the advance polls a few days ago, he drew an X beside NDP candidate Elizabeth Long’s name.

Mr. Snodofsky thought Mr. Karygiannis was a good representative. With the longtime MP no longer on the ballot, he went with the party that most matched his political views.

This is the worst-case scenario for the Liberals. As in Trinity-Spadina, a failure to win the riding will raise questions about how Mr. Trudeau and his team have operated.

The new Liberal candidate, Arnold Chan, is a lawyer who spent years working at Queen’s Park as an assistant to former premier Dalton McGuinty and cabinet minister Michael Chan.

While he may not be a star in the same way as Mr. Vaughan or retired lieutenant-general Andrew Leslie, Mr. Chan has previously worked with Trudeau’s two closest advisers: Mr. Butts and Katie Telford. In addition, he beat Mr. Karygiannis’s former assistant, Nick Mantas, for the Liberal nomination.

Even under Mr. Karygiannis, the Liberals’ share of the vote in Scarborough-Agincourt has been steadily falling since 2000. The riding was one of the few in the Greater Toronto Area that remained Liberal red in 2011, but the Conservatives were steadily closing the gap.

There is a fear among the Liberals that a low voter turnout, sandwiched as it is between a weekend and Canada Day, will help the Tories.

The Conservative candidate, Mr. Ellis, has skipped all the debates in the riding; other candidates say they haven’t seen him out in the riding. That underlines the belief he is counting on enough hardcore supporters showing up Monday to bring him to victory. Mr. Ellis’s campaign office said he was too busy for an interview.

Meanwhile, the NDP are taking heart from the 2011 federal election, when several long-time Liberal ridings in the area, including neighbouring Scarborough-Rouge River, flipped to orange.

Ms. Long, an immigration lawyer born in mainland China, says the NDP didn’t have much presence when her campaign started. If lawn signs are any indication, she has made up ground.

Mr. Chan acknowledges the pressure to keep Scarborough-Agincourt for his Liberals.

“If you look at successive elections, the Liberal brand has taken a beating,” he says during a pause in meeting early-morning commuters on one of the last days of the campaign. “If we don’t reverse that trend, the Liberal party has a chance of being wiped out.”